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Swan Oat posted:Our Department of Transportation is so underbudget that it has converted some portions of our roads to gravel to save on maintenance fees, and I have heard that roads in areas with a lot of fracking are in absolutely terrible condition due to vehicle damage from heavy trucks. Anecdotally, living in Houston, I can say that while our highways are generally well maintained, with one notable exception, the surface streets are in pretty bad condition. Weirdly, things are kinda going the other direction in Dallas. 635, which is a ludicrously crowded highway that people desperately try to avoid driving during rush hour if possible, has been under construction for some time building expanded HOV lanes which are available to non-HOV drivers under a congestion pricing scheme. I know at least some sections of these lanes are now open. Additionally, there's been a long running project to build a ludicrously stupid tollway inside the Trinity River's levees, an area that regularly floods. In 2007, there was a big debate about the road which led to a referendum to stop its construction, which failed. The last six months, however, has seen a lot of the big money supporters of the project turn against it and decide it should not be built. Additionally, there's now a debate about whether we should rip out an existing highway. I-345 is a 1.5 mile stretch of road that connects Central Expressway (a major north-south route for traffic) with the end of I-45. Maintenance is needed, and TxDOT has approved money for the maintenance, but there's currently a debate over whether the road should just be ripped out and replaced with an at-grade parkway, using the extra land for development, and hopefully reconnect the neighborhoods that are currently separated by this highway running between them. It's not action on the Trinity Tollway or the tear down of I-345 yet, but there's a lot of debate for some ideas you'd think would be largely summarily dismissed.
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Jun 19, 2014 16:25
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Shear Modulus posted:Nope, the most effective professors are the ones who teach the most students and cost the least amount of money. I might have misunderstood exactly how grant money a professor reels in is counted, but that's the gist of it. So is this rating something like golf, where lower scores are better? Because if the formula is salary / students, then a highly paid teacher who teaches almost no one gets a high number and someone making almost nothing teaching a huge number of students gets a low one. thefncrow fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 01:57
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zoux posted:Wendy getting the nom was due to the fact that she was the only Texas Democrat that anybody could recognize. Also, because she was likely to lose an election in 2014 anyway, so why not take a shot at governor. In 2012, every seat in the state Senate was up for election due to the recent redistricting. However, the setup of the Senate is for staggered 4 year terms with half the body up for election every 2 years. With the redistricting, everyone faced re-election, and then at the start of the 2012 term, Senators drew lots to determine if they'd just been elected to a 2 or 4 year term. Davis drew a 2 year term, putting her back up for election in her redrawn district where she was supposed to lose in 2012, only now she'd be facing the midterm electorate. She was likely to lose her seat in 2014 anyway, so why not take a shot at the governor's race instead of losing her state senate race.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:45
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Doom Rooster posted:This is so weird to me. I grew up in Dallas, and Austin. I went to public schools both places. I went to college is Dallas. I was never forced to do a Texas Pledge, and until this discussion, I literally did not know that such a pledge existed. The real question might be: when did you attend school? I never saw that garbage in college either, but it definitely existed in high school. However, there was a significant difference in frequency pre- and post-9/11. Before 9/11, they might do pledges 2-3 times a year. After 9/11, it became more like 2-3 times a week.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:30
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Doom Rooster posted:I watched the second tower get hit live on the TV in my 10th grade geometry class. So graduating class of '03 in Farmers Branch, the suburb of Dallas. I guess if it became mandatory for the fall semester of '03, that would explain it. You're actually slightly behind me then (graduated '02). I didn't even know about the mandatory thing, it was just my high school noticeably changed their attitude afterwards.
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Jan 25, 2015 13:00
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The registration/inspection stuff is weird. I had my registration up in February, and inspection ran out in June. As far as I can tell, even though my old inspection sticker had expired, it would be meaningless for me to go get my car inspected now, and I'll have to get it done in the 90 days before my registration expires next year.
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Jul 30, 2015 17:07
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zoux posted:I don't think that you'd get pulled over this year for not having a inspection sticker just because DPS/local LE are supposed to be giving people grace periods while the new law goes into effect. But in your case I'm not sure because the law went into effect in March and you have a February sticker. Does that site I posted not have explain? Using the thing that says when I have to inspect the car, it just tells me to have the car inspected within 90 days of my next registration. That's pretty much all it says about my situation.
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Jul 30, 2015 17:52
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Paxton is seemingly already getting special treatment. Paxton was booked in Collin County, and Collin County has had a policy of putting this white towel on people while having their mugshot taken, obscuring whatever clothing the subject is wearing at the time. Everyone gets photographed with the towel, except Paxton apparently.
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Aug 3, 2015 23:34
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radical meme posted:This young man was convicted of Sexual Assault and, even though the jury found that he should serve 8 years in prison, the Judge gave him six months in jail and ten years probation. You've got your facts wrong here. The judge didn't reduce the sentence from what the jury found for, he increased it. That's because the jury found for a sentence of 8 years of probation. The judge added 2 years of probation and added the 180 days in jail. It's still a hosed up sentence, but it's the jury that hosed it up. http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/baylor-de-sam-ukwuachu-sentenced-to-180-days-in-jail--10-years-probation-222938095.html quote:After hearing hours of testimony and summations Friday, the jury took more than three hours to come back with a sentence of eight years of probation. However, the judge changed the sentence to 10 years probation, 180 days in county jail and 400 hours of community service.
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Aug 22, 2015 00:53
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boom boom boom posted:From what they've said on the radio, I think it legalizes rape in women's bathrooms? I'm voting no, I don't know why anyone would support that. I really, really hope this is sarcasm, but this is so common that I'm really afraid it isn't.
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Nov 3, 2015 02:07
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To follow up on the stuff about Dallas and going to battle with this family that they're talking about as slumlords, we now have this story from the Dallas Observer: In Meeting With Landlords, Mayor Talked About Selling Land, Not Conditions In short, it appears that the Khraish family recorded a meeting they had with the mayor last year. The whole tape is online and linked in the article, the article highlights some excerpts from that tape. But the gist of the recording appears to be that Mayor Rawlings' concerns were basically: 1) How about you make those homes look nicer?, and 2) Hey, what if we helped arrange deals for you to sell these homes? You guys interested?
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Oct 20, 2016 05:37
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I've been a little suspicious of Julian Castro since his time at HUD. Dallas has had a history of doing some really shady poo poo with federal HUD money and was on the wrong end of a lot of ugly facts after 5 years of investigating the city's use of federal desegregation money to effectively segregate housing. And then Castro walks in, makes a visit to talk to the mayor, and suddenly HUD is saying "So, that investigation we did, we got it all wrong and Dallas pinky swears that they're going to try to do a better job, so let's just forget any of this happened."
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Dec 15, 2017 04:36
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Earth posted:This isn't a good reason for me to move there. I want to be around more like minded people not less. The pay might be enough to forget about any of that poo poo though. No smoking in bars in Dallas proper. Some of the suburbs don't have bans, but the rule in general around here tends to be non-smoking. There are plenty of shitheads around, especially in the Metroplex suburbs, but Dallas proper is trending more left-leaning. If you're going to be just south of DFW Airport, then you're probably Arlington, maybe Grand Prairie. Both of those tend to be the sort of Metroplex suburb I was mentioning above. For example, Arlington has voted not to join the regional public transit system because they're incredibly white and made a boogeyman out of the idea of black people taking buses into Arlington. Instead, they've taken roughly the same amount of money it'd take to have public transportation and used that money to fund stadiums for sports teams, creating constant traffic problems because literally anyone who wants to attend those events has to drive to the event. Arlington does have a college campus, so things might be OK in that area surrounding the campus, but I wouldn't bet on it. thefncrow fucked around with this message at 23:29 on May 19, 2018 |
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May 19, 2018 21:32
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Marxalot posted:I know nothing about that area so maybe they do have a point, but that article seems like your typical Texas "wasting are tax dollars Nah, you've got this read wrong. The new progressive vision for cities is basically to try to bring the city back together as much as possible to allow for multi-modal transportation instead of assuming everyone has a car. It's not about saying "gently caress your cars, use something else", but about ensuring that the policy isn't "Buy a car or gently caress off". There's a good story from the CityMAP report referenced in that story about traffic engineers studying along I-35 towards a solution for connecting the continually growing Design District on the west side of I-35 to Victory Park on the east side of the freeway. They're standing at a rail station along the east side of the highway, when all of a sudden they notice a guy on the west side of the freeway who crosses the frontage road and then walks into a drainage tunnel. He comes out the drainage tunnel on the east side of the highway, grabs a board that's been left there, and uses it to climb a wall that separates the drainage tunnel from the light rail stop. At first they figured he was homeless, but when he gets close enough they realize he's wearing slacks and a polo, and he pulls an iPad out of his bag while he's waiting for the train. They start asking him questions, and it turns out that he does this for his commute to work just every work day. The light rail station is situated where it is because of the stadium nearby, which has happened to place it roughly exactly halfway between the streets that run under the highway, which are basically the only places where traffic can cross it. For anyone not in a car, the highway is serving as a giant wall. And as they're asking this guy if this is a regular thing, they see another person crawling over the same wall using the same board. The new plan, at least hopefully, is to recognize that while highways are necessary to enable some heavy level of automobile transit, you have to recognize and try to ameliorate the negative side-effects of them. When they're not necessary for traffic purposes, they shouldn't be there, and if they are necessary, you at least need to try to minimize their impact on the neighboring areas (burying them below grade, providing mechanisms for pedestrians and bikers that aren't just "there's a tiny sidewalk along the bridges built for cars", etc). The TxDOT study throws all those principles out the window and basically says "It's been a while since we expanded these roads, so it's time to pave more highways and further disconnect these neighborhoods". And that's because TxDOT doesn't give a poo poo about what's good for the cities, it just cares about doling out construction money.
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May 27, 2018 19:35
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" fare but with a side of "highways are racist" and "Why bother building it if people are just going to drive on -my- highway.
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:Here's a feature about the insane post-Columbine overreaction at Allen High School (with the $60 million football stadium) in the DFW suburbs leading to a snowballing wave of bomb threats which shut the school district down for several weeks: When I was a freshman in college, I ran into some kids from Allen who had been through that. They talked about some of the bomb threats basically coinciding with tests from notoriously difficult teachers. Like, if the AP Physics class had an exam that day in 3rd period, a tip about a bomb would land on the tip line like 45 minutes before 3rd period was to start.
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Jun 2, 2018 07:52
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zoux posted:What's been coming our of A&M that pisses you off JUST MAKING CHILI posted:Aggies But I'm guessing it also has to do with the stuff about A&M protecting men who commit sexual assault.
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Jun 30, 2018 17:50
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